Streaming from Solo2 to Kodi on Amazon Fire Issue

[bathingaper]

Not sure if this goes here or in the Kodi section but here goes....

I am able to stream from my Solo2 box to my Kodi install on my Acer Revo perfectly fine however when performing the same action on my Kodi install on the Amazon Fire TV (not stick), then I run in to some issues - which I'm hoping someone on here can help with.

I can view channel list etc perfectly fine but the problems lie during playback. In SD - when watching fast moving shows, such as the football, I notice excessive tearing. I have enabled deinterlacing however the issue remains. It doesn't render it unwatchable however it would be nice for a smooth picture. When wathing any HD stream - the video is 100% unwatchable. Very very jittery however audio remains unaffected. I'm not even sure where to begin with this. At first I wasn't sure if the Amazon Fire TV box was capable of processing the stream somehow however I can watch 1080p movies from my server perfectly fine. My Amazon Fire, Acer Revo and Solo2 are connected to the same gigabit network using Cat6 cabling.

Hoping someone can help!

[Trial]

Hi,
did you set the Fire to 50Hz? I think standard is 60Hz.

ciao

[bathingaper]

Hi,
did you set the Fire to 50Hz? I think standard is 60Hz.

ciao

Not that I can remember. I will have a look at this tonight. Thanks

[bathingaper]

Sounds like a refresh rate issue, as for the HD side of things the Solo2 transcodes via software, it will really struggle with HD and require the bitrate to be set low, the Duo2 apparently has hardware transcoding so will be better suited in theory. I've not tested the Duo2, but again dropping the bit-rate on a Solo2 would be my suggestion (look at CPU usage).


I'm not using transcoding though. It's a direct stream, which works flawlessly on my Kodi setup on the Acer Revo.

[bathingaper]

Hi,
did you set the Fire to 50Hz? I think standard is 60Hz.

ciao
Tried changing to 50Hz but issue still remains.

[Joe_90]

Do you have a setting "Vertical Blank Sync" in Kodi? I recall that being an issue for me some time back and setting it to "disabled" cured the tearing. However, it was on a completely different setup than Fire TV.

[bathingaper]

Do you have a setting "Vertical Blank Sync" in Kodi? I recall that being an issue for me some time back and setting it to "disabled" cured the tearing. However, it was on a completely different setup than Fire TV.
I don't recall it but I'll have a look.

[DaMacFunkin]

The problem you are having is a combination of refresh rate and the stream being interlaced.
SPMC is a Android specific fork of Kodi, the latest beta 16.5 (actually 16.4.82 this version is not the version in the play store.) enables refresh rate switching on AFTV.
Make sure you set Video output on the fire to auto, fire up SPMC and set adjust refresh rate to always, give your self a margin of 1-2 seconds to pause on refresh rate change and obviously enable deinterlace.
If you are still not happy with the playback quality try turning either of the hardware media codec settings off or even try both off to force software decoding.

[bathingaper]

The problem you are having is a combination of refresh rate and the stream being interlaced.
SPMC is a Android specific fork of Kodi, the latest beta 16.5 (actually 16.4.82 this version is not the version in the play store.) enables refresh rate switching on AFTV.
Make sure you set Video output on the fire to auto, fire up SPMC and set adjust refresh rate to always, give your self a margin of 1-2 seconds to pause on refresh rate change and obviously enable deinterlace.
If you are still not happy with the playback quality try turning either of the hardware media codec settings off or even try both off to force software decoding.

Thanks. I'll give this a try. The problem I'll now have is that if I install SPMC, I'm not sure if I'll be able to use the shared library feature of Kodi (using mySQL) as I'm pretty sure all versions of Kodi in the house have to be the same? However I suppose I could have them both running side by side. One for my media and one for streaming from Solo2 :)

Last night I changed Amazon Fire TV to 50hz and changed the Solo2 to 50Hz too. What I now notice is that live streaming of BBC HD channels is not stuttering anymore however Channel 4 HD is unwatchable. Why would that be?